Knot Not Nought Sreshta Rit Premnath '03

In 1974, under the auspices of Anka Ptszkowska’s gallery 25*, French conceptual artist Daniel Buren painted 8.7cm vertical stripes over the windows of an apartment in Warsaw that would later become Edward Krasinski’s studio. In the early 1990’s Krasinski applied his signature 20mm blue tape, 130cms above the floor, around the entire studio including the windows that Buren had painted. Both artists conceived of their gestures as being a zero mark that revealed the existing architecture in a space. They claimed that the line and the stripes were not things in themselves, but rather framing devices for opening onto a world. What happened when these gestures intersected?

In Knot Not Nought, Sreshta Rit Premnath revisits this historical moment. He uses it to shine a light on the difficulty of distinguishing between a gesture and an object. Redeploying the coincidence of these two previous works of art, he asks if two gestures pointing at each other can continue to function as framing devices, or are they conscripted into objecthood? Premnath brings to bear on this question a philosophical tradition that investigates the relationship between the things that exist and the empty space that permeates the universe. When we gesture toward an object, this school of thought reminds us, we are also gesturing at the nothingness that inheres in it. The being of objects ties the knot between what is and what is nought, but we have not the linguistic means to comprehend this space. It is here that Premnath turns to visual representation.